“And Lord, in the Name of Jesus Christ Thy Son Our Lord and Savior, we pray for Coach Silvano, thy servant, that he might overcome all interferers, all opposition, that the morons and bureaucrats who are always trying to slow him down be confused in their . . . in their efforts. Allow him to shine forth as the example to us of manhood, sportsmanship . . . and uhm . . . and Christian witness, and may he be rewarded the victory for thy son’s glorious sake. In thy most blessed name, we beseech you from our hearts. Amen.”
There was a moment of silence, then a great bending back of cardboard lids.
Sheila was history in about a week. Vince had to go out of town to find the next girl, a senior from Jonesboro, who had been in a beauty pageant and sometimes wore her tiara.
I overheard Vince and Tilden talking in the locker room. The end of Tilden’s sentence as I walked in was, “—your dad must be so damn proud.”
“Maybe he is. It’s hard to tell.”
“Look, when you decide, tell me. I want to go where you go. I want to play for the team you play for.”
Vince said, “You got it, man.”
Tilden wasn’t good enough that the same school that gave Vince a scholarship would give him one. I thought of this with a measure of cruel satisfaction, from which I recoiled almost immediately. I stood there in the locker room thinking about why I’d sneered at my friend’s hopes. It was because I’d decided against continuing football, maybe even against college. I would be happy running the hardware store. I knew that. But I was jealous that Tilden might be with Vince and I not. Vince had his father’s glamour that way, that even when you disapproved of him, you wanted to be with him.
When Glen’s dad came to our house, and Mom had let him in and called me down from my room, I didn’t know who he was. I’d only seen him through the window, reading, or heard his voice from the interior of his house, bidding his son farewell when he came out to the wilderness with us. But I was well trained, and extended my hand and said, “Happy to see you, sir.” Then I waited.
There was a long pause. Finally he realized the problem. “Oh. I’m his dad. I’m Gene Copland. I’m Glen’s father.”
Fuck, I thought deep inside my brain.
We sat in the living room, and Gene Copland asked me how my school year was going and whether I was thinking about college and whatnot. His manner was so like my own father’s that I thought there must have been some manual for growing up in their generation, the likes of which was conspicuously missing from mine. He’d served in the Pacific, and had a big red scar from elbow to shoulder where shrapnel got him. “I was too old,” he said, “too old and slow to get out of the way. They should have seen that at the recruitment center.” He smiled. It was a joke. I smiled back at him. Like all boys my age, I was interested in the war, and led him to talk about the Zeros, as much as you can remember when you’re diving into trenches to get away from them.
The war stories were over. Mr. Copland sat for a moment with his hands in his lap.
Finally he said, “Glen says you’re his only friend.”
“No, no sir, there are at least four of us and I assure you—”
“The only friend who understands. He says you still smile at him in the hall.”
Only then did I realize what an insufficient gesture that was.
“He—” Mr. Copland shrugged. I couldn’t help him, because I honestly had no idea what he was going to say.
“When I was about seventeen,” he said, taking a different tack, “I met his mother. Mrs. Copland. Ruth. I think you met her.”
“Yes sir.”
“Meeting her may not prepare you for what I’m about to say. People look at one person and see different things. She’s . . . she’s not a movie star by any means. I know that. But when I met her . . . I hope you understand what I’m saying. I hope you have somebody like that, or will before too long. Glen says you have a girl, right?”
“Yes. Sherry.”
“Good. Excellent. Keep her, if you can. The love of one’s youth—anyway when I met Ruthie it was like being thrown down onto the ground. The bomb blast that did this to my arm was nothing in comparison. I loved her . . . so much. She was a bomb that exploded every morning when I woke and thought of her. She didn’t notice me at first. We come from St. Louis, and society is . . . uhm . . . stratified there, and I wasn’t the sort of person she would look at. If she did, there would be plenty of people to set her straight and find her somebody . . . more suitable. But I . . . I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Actually I took no for an answer about a hundred times . . . but I kept coming on back . . . and back. I knew Ruthie was the one person I was going to love in my life, the one and only, and that I would love her forever, and it just wasn’t fair for her to go through life without that. I don’t know how I won, but I did, and Ruthie and I . . . will go through all this to the end.”
He raised his hands up, palms flat at “all this,” to indicate the universe and eternity.
“So when Glen said to me that he . . . that he had found somebody, and that it looked impossible, I told him all this. I told him he must never give up. He must try everything. He had to let ‘no’ or ‘get lost’ run off him like rain from a duck’s back. Arden, he never told me it was . . . he never told me it was another man. There was nothing in . . . nothing in the way he was around us to indicate that. This Vince would come to our house . . . by day he’d use the door just like everybody else. Nice boy. Always with the wisecracks. But at night he would come . . . and not use the door. Glen’s window would open and close . . . there would be whispering. If they had been younger, I would have thought nothing. But . . . I knew. After a time. I said nothing, but I knew.”
I was trying to have no reaction at all. He noted this and went on. “I wasn’t used to it. I didn’t know what to say. But I don’t think I could have given him any other advice, though. Anything other than what I said. If this is what he wanted—so bad—” Mr. Copland shrugged. “He is very unhappy.”
“I know.”
“Can you help him?”
“You tell me how and I’ll do it.”
“This Vince . . . he’s the same way?
“Looks like. At least where Glen’s concerned.”
“So there is hope?”
“Not while Coach is alive.”
Copland’s shoulders sagged. He looked small and old sitting in my dad’s chair. “Then be his friend, Arden. If you can, just be his friend.”
I said I would. Mr. Copland shuffled out into the evening. I had lied. I didn’t know how to be Glen’s friend anymore. I was Vince’s friend first, and if Vince was backing away, so was I.
While Glen went ghosting through the halls, clinging to the walls like a rat, the rest of us rode high. She ran every third committee and club, and I joined them, even, ludicrously, the French club, to be near her. Coach was so happy to have his boy back that he often forgot to be cruel, and we looked surreptitiously at each other at the end of practices where he hadn’t prescribed five laps of wind sprints before we could go home. Vince dated Carmen, who was in the fashion vanguard by having her peroxide hair piled up onto her head like a triton shell, and teased and sprayed so that even a full body tackle wouldn’t dislodge it. She must have picked that up from the summer she spent with an aunt in Charlotte. I was pleased with myself because I sowed love all around me, heaps of it on Sherry and Vince and Tilden and Andy and Mom and Dad, but even great handfuls on the kids I passed in the halls or rammed bone against bone in scrimmage. Someone who has a relationship with God should tell Him how much better people are when they are happy. I know the saints are meant to be good and kind even when they’re sick and miserable, but that’s too much to ask of most of us. My goodness extended to visiting the Coplands every now and then. I’d sit in the kitchen and talk with his mom and dad. They were always sorry that Glen, somehow, wasn’t home—as if he had a life and could conceivably be somewhere else. I figured he was there and just couldn’t face me. That got old after a while, and
I stopped the visits, though I always waved when I passed by on the way to Tilden’s, so they’d know I was thinking of them.
Tilden got to Advanced Physics and something clicked with him. I was sitting beside him when he “got” it. I heard a swift intake of breath, like someone preparing to be sick, and turned and saw Tilden beaming rays of comprehension the likes of which nobody had seen before. He raised his hand. He answered the question Mr. Schmitz had already asked fruitlessly seven times. The answer was right. Tilden asked a follow-up, the answer to which had to be looked up, because teacher didn’t know. Mr. Schmitz had to sit down and calm himself. After class, Schmitz marched Tilden down to the counselors’ office and picked him up a college application and made him fill it out. In thirty years of teaching, Helmut Schmitz had never had a protégé until that very hour. He loved Tilden with a love pure and radiant. Tilden went up and down the halls saying to everyone who’d listen, “I’m going to be a physicist.”
Tilden was easy to love. It was like sitting beside a camp-fire. He provided occasion to contemplate blessing and privilege. Tilden was blessed. Good, one thought, because he was one’s friend. But why Tilden and not somebody else? Why not Timmy who fell down the Falls? Why not Clarence who fell down the Falls? Why not those Jewish kids listening in cellars for the tread of Nazi boots? Would I take the blessing away from Tilden until all could be explained to my satisfaction? Hell no. At that point I let the cosmos hoard its mysteries. Tilden could go ahead and be happy if that’s what God wanted.
On the other hand, big brother Andy seemed to be in a holding pattern, dating a few local girls, working down at Dad’s store, something which he never liked but never complained about. He was pale and quiet. You could cuddle him and be near him, but part of the pleasure was gone because he didn’t seem to notice in particular. You think soldiers will come home from victory with their chests puffed out crowing like cocks of the walk, but that didn’t happen to Andy. I began to gather it didn’t happen much at all except in the movies.
The one thing that brought a spark to him was when Chief Dadlez pulled, as the saying was then, a boner, when he did something stupid or was quoted in some stupid comment in the regional paper. That got Andy fired up in a way that was not easy to understand. Andy wasn’t a mocker (I am; it’s one of the many ways I must have been a disappointment to my parents) nor were his comments about Dadlez mockery, but rather a sort of indignation, as though something important and solemn were being misrepresented. He hadn’t got himself blown up in an Italian wheat field so fools could strut around making stupid comments. He’d rehearse his objections in front of Mom at the breakfast table. She’d nod and agree, and this might have given Andy the conviction that his objections made universal sense. One day, at his patience’s end and bolstered by Mom’s tacit agreement, he roared down to the two-room police station and laid his grievances before Chief Dadlez. I would like to have been a fly on the wall for that one. I told him he was going to get himself arrested, but I was wrong. Andy came back with a silver badge and a pamphlet that would help him study for the police officer’s exam. Dadlez had shut him up by hiring him.
Something had kept Andy from saying, “I want to be a cop,” or us from saying it for him, which was odd, because we all must have seen he would make a good one, what with his quiet patience, his strength, his kindness. I guess we thought he’d go away and make something of himself in a big city somewhere. No. He wanted to stay home. He wanted to stay home and protect those he loved. He was the biggest homebody in the world, and our grand designs for him had not let him admit it. Within six months he was a full-fledged cop, Dadlez’s heir apparent, and married to Neetha, Tilden’s big sister, which made Tilden and me brothers-in-law, which was very, very cool. They had been sweethearts in high school, but when the war came many threads were broken. Some could be rewoven. Andy the cat had fallen a long time, but at last had landed on his feet.
You look for the ratchet to make it all stay, to keep it all from falling back.
September. The high hills southward were getting their first color. Coach had some paperwork for me to look at, so I was late getting to the shower after practice. I came into the locker room toweling off. When I pulled the towel off my head I saw Vince sitting on the bench in front of his locker, looking at the floor.
“V,” I said.
“Ardo.”
“Thought you were long gone.”
“Nope.”
“You waiting for your dad?”
“Not really. Just—”
“Waiting?”
“Yeah.”
“He was easy on us today.”
Vince harrumphed.
I toweled a little at the back my neck. “So, have you heard yet?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tennessee. Chapel Hill—”
The team stars had been waiting for offers from colleges. One of the traditions of the squad was not to talk about offers, because it seemed braggedy and those who hadn’t gotten any would feel bad. But you could ask, and if you asked the lucky boy could tell.
“Yeah, them. Western. Waiting for Duke, but I don’t really want to go there.”
“Still, you got a choice.”
“UNC probably won’t start me. Tennessee will. That might be the choice.”
“Excited?”
“Trying to be, Ardo. You?”
“Got a couple of phone calls. I said no.”
“You’re pretty fed up with football, no?”
“Yeah. Nobody’s fault, though.”
“Yes it is. My dad’s. I want to keep going just to see what it would be like to play for somebody who isn’t insane.”
I laughed. Only Vince would dare say that. Vince had his pants off but a white singlet still on, like he’d been knocked unconscious for a second while trying to undress.
“Better hurry. Coach is going to turn the hot water off.”
“There’ll be plenty. Ardo?”
“Yeah?”
“We alone?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t feel the way I should. I don’t feel—”
“What? You don’t feel what?”
“Happy. I should be happy. Everything’s going exactly the way”—he paused so long I was starting to say something, but then he added—“it should.”
“Carmen is choice,” I said, mentioning his current squeeze.
“Carmen is choice. It’s not that.”
It wasn’t football either. Vince’s touch was golden. Nothing on the field went wrong for him. It wasn’t academics; Coach had all the teachers trained so they just passed him along. I thought I knew what it was but I, by God, wasn’t going to say it.
Vince tugged at the singlet so that was off too. “Is Andy going to marry Tilden’s sister?”
“Looks like.”
“I wish I had a sister. You could marry her.”
“I would, too.” For the moment, friendship was more important than reminding him of Sherry. I loved Vince. Seeing him there kind of crumpled up and vulnerable made me love him tenderly, like I should go and hold him for a minute. Of course I didn’t.
Vince touched the tip of his dick, lovingly, as though preparing it for the shock of the shower. I said, “Think of all the girls that would pay cash money to be where I am, watching Vince Silvano with his pants off.”
He smiled a huge smile. Then I ruined it. I went too far. I swear I wasn’t thinking of anything but the next joke when I said, “Plenty of guys, too.”
Vince’s face collapsed before he burst into tears. Really sobbing. I stood there toweling my stupid ass while my best friend sobbed on the locker room bench. I went and turned a shower on real hard, so if somebody were still there besides us, they wouldn’t hear.
X
For Homecoming that year the Boosters made a gigantic bonfire on the football field. They put up crepe paper and paper flowers like it was a prom, and hired a band, and the mayor was there, and a state representative, and more journalist
s than was good for a town like ours. Tables of cold cuts and loaves of bread were laid out under the half moon. Vats of pink punch sat unprotected from the surreptitious flasks of revelers. Dogs raced and barked between people’s legs. Baby sisters and brothers toddled in the long grass. The team was got up in our red and gold varsity sweaters, each with a golden cardboard crown on our head to underline the truth that we were the kings of the world. The principal threw a football to Coach and Coach threw it to Vince and Vince threw it to some pretty girl in the crowd. She caught it, and that seemed to all a fine omen. Speeches broke out here, old time fight songs and alma maters. They sang the UT alma mater because everyone thought Vince was going there. It was wonderful. Carmen made sure to maneuver herself and her hair and Vince as close to the bonfire as they could, to make sure of being perpetually in the light. Andy parked his patrol car at the edge of the firelight. He’d say it was to give everyone a sense of security, but it was actually so he could drink in the excitement, the innocence, the great fire that was not a city burning.
Lightning flashed way off to the west. It would take a while to get to us, if it came at all.
The punch was spiked like mad. Each spiker thought he was the first. We had more than we actually wanted, lifting the tin cups higher and higher, to savor the image of ourselves drinking to a stupor barefaced before teachers and parents.
At some point, Glen walked out of the crowd. Sherry saw him and elbowed me. I was afraid at first, but the look on him was beneficent. The glow of hero-worship beamed from his face when he looked at Vince, but in that he was no different from anybody else in the milling crowd. What was different is that he walked up to Vince in the scarlet and golden firelight, pushed Carmen gently to one side, and kissed him on the lips.
For a moment it looked like it was going to be all right. The part of the crowd that could see Vince and Glen fell silent in the first seconds, but here and there tinkled forth a titter of laugher, and it could have been that everyone would laugh it off as some drunken overstatement of enthusiasm, even a kind of nerd satire. There was not a man in the school who didn’t want to kiss Vince that night. I couldn’t imagine what thoughts were coursing through their minds, either of them. I held my breath. I saw Vince come to a decision. He pulled back his bullet-pass right arm and slugged Glen in the face. Glen staggered and went down on one knee. Over all the sounds of bonfire and reveling and the tentative upsurge of laughter, Vince shouted, “YOU GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, YOU QUEER!”
The Falls of the Wyona Page 11
